A blog that I post on whenever I see something that makes me want to go off on a Republican (Libertarian every once in a while) rant. I will cover stories from all over the nation and world, but I will try to cover as many stories about my home state of Michigan as I can (I'll also talk a lot about Texas, because Texas is awesome!).

Posts Tagged ‘Latter-Day Saints’

I know it’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post, but this was just too interesting to pass up. Yesterday night, a friend showed me this video:

Now, how many Hanukkah songs do you think have been written by a Mormon Senator? My guess is that that’s the only one.

Tablet Magazine discusses the details of how the song ended up getting written, including an interesting story where Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) called columnist Jeffery Goldberg on Christmas Eve to talk to him about the song that he had written, “Eight Days of Hanukkah”.

It’s quite an interesting story, so check it out. And the song is pretty catchy too.

Senator Hatch has always been one of my favorite Senators, but I honestly had no idea that Hatch was a songwriter. My opinion of him went up a little more after seeing this.

OK, first, I know that many of you will say that Mormons are Christians. 1. That’s not what I believe. 2. We’re not here to debate this.

What I am here to say is that the Religious Right (who I proudly call myself a member of) needs to snap out of this “I’ll only vote for a TRUE CHRISTIAN!” mentality. I’ll think about voting for anybody who is pro-life. If you’re pro-choice, you’re out of consideration for me. After this I take into effect some other social issues as well as allowances for certain personal freedoms (where my semi-libertarianism kicks in), and lastly economics (I’ll vote for a fiscal liberal before a social liberal any day).

I’m just going to highlight his 3 main points, and let you read the rest if you want to (and I’d really encourage you to):

There is no risk that a Mormon President will drive people into the Mormon Church.

There is no Biblical support for the fear that God will judge our nation if we elect someone to be our President who is not theologically sound.

The lives of 4 million innocent Americans should outweigh any concerns we might have regarding the theological failings of our president.

If the Religious Right refuses to vote for Mitt Romney (in the general election, I’ll be fine if they support Huckabee or somebody else in the primary) because of his religion, I will denounce the movement and disassociate from it, because they have gone from not caring about issues to only caring about religion. And I doubt that they think that all the Presidents that have claimed to be Christians, meaning that they would have to judge the religiosity of candidates, which is something left up to GOD to do, NOT Christians.

But Huckabee’s campaign did not provide more information about the exchange, which the magazine reported this way in the article by Zev Chafets: “I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘I think it’s a religion,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know much about it.’

“I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘Don’t Mormons,’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'”

Here are my thoughts – Huckabee was just asking a question. Even I thought this was true – I had to do about 10 minutes of looking through stuff to find a Mormon opinion on this (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints website doesn’t have a search button, and I simply don’t have time to read through ALL of their doctrinal statements). So I found a Mormon blog who explained it as Jesus and Satan are spirit-brothers, but in a sense we all are.

Romney refused to answer Huckabee’s question, saying that the LDS Church has already answered questions on this, which I thought was a VERY poor move on his part, and it made him look like he was avoiding the issue.

I think that Huckabee was simply asking a question, and I do not like that Romney is trying to use this for his political gain – I think it was tacky and I think he was using religion on his side, something that he himself has indicated that he didn’t want to happen in this campaign.

This being said, I still support Romney as the candidate that I will vote for (which is the first time I’ve endorsed him on this blog), but I would also be perefectly happy with Huckabee as the GOP nominee; I only feel that Romney holds to more of the values that are “weighted” higher when I decide candidates as well as the fact that I think Romney would do better in a general election (although I think a Romney/Huckabee campaign would be the best scenario at this point and would perform quite well in my mind).